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Questions of the Day. No. XLVIII. 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS 

t 


AX ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE REFORM CLUB 
OF NEW YORK, APRIL 13 , 1888 


HV 


/ 


^JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL] 






«r C6A', 


'jiji. 25 1888 Ti ’ 

“ WASH' " 

NEW YORK & LONDON 

PUTNAM’S SONS 

^nitlurboclur Ihess 

1888 







COPYRIGHT 

1888 

By JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 


Press of 

G. P. Pl’tnam’s Sons 
New York 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS. 


I HAVE not been so much surprised as perhaps I ought to 
have been to learn that, in the opinion of some of our lead¬ 
ing politicians and of many of our newspapers, men of 
scholarly minds are ipso facto debarred from forming any 
judgment on public affairs ; or, if they should be so un¬ 
scrupulous as to do so, that they must at least refrain from 
communicating it to their fellow-citizens. One eminent 
gentleman has even gone so far as to sneer at school books 
as sources of information. If he had a chance, he would 
perhaps take a hint from what is fabled of the Caliph Omar 
and burn our libraries, because if they contained doctrine 
not to be found in his speeches they would be harmful, while 
if the doctrine, judged by that test, were orthodox, they 
would be useless. Books have hitherto been supposed to 
be armories of human experience, where we might equip 
ourselves for the battles of opinion while we had yet vigor 
and hopefulness enough left to make our weapons of some 
avail. 

Through books the youngest of us could converse with 
more generations than Nestor; could attain that ripened 
judgment which is the privilege of old age without old age’s 
drawbacks and diminutions. This has been the opinion of 
many men, not reckoned the least wise in their generation. 
But they were mistaken, it seems. I looked round with 
saddened wonder at the costly apparatus of schoolhouses 


3 


4 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS. 


provided by our ancestors to the avowed end that “ good 
learning might not cease from among us/’ at the libraries 
and universities by the founding of which our rich men seek 
to atone for their too rapidly agglomerated wealth, and said 
to myself: What a wasteful blunder we have been making! ”■ 
Then it suddenly occurred to me that this putting of culture 
under the ban might be, after all, but a more subtle applica¬ 
tion of the American System, as it is called, which would ex¬ 
clude all foreign experience, as well as the raw material of 
it, till we had built up an experience of our own at the same 
cost of mistake and retribution which is its unvarying price. 
This might indeed flatter my pride of country, though it left 
me, as Grumio says, to “ return unexperienced to my grave.”” 

But if we are forbidden to seek knowledge in books, what 
is the alternative ? I could think of none unless it were im¬ 
mediate inspiration. It is true that I could not see that any 
authentic marks of it were revealed by the advocates of this 
novel theory. They keep their secret remarkably well. No 
doubt inspiration, like money, is a very handy thing to have, 
and if I should ever see an advertisement of any shop where 
it could be bought, even at second-hand, I would lay in a 
stock of it forthwith. It is more convenient than knowledge, 
for, like certain articles of wearing apparel, it is adjustable 
to the prevailing taste of the moment in any part of the 
country. It seems more studious of the traditions and preju¬ 
dices of the multitude than the utterances of Isaiah were 
wont to be. I must frankly confess at the outset that I 
come to you wholly unprovided with this precious com¬ 
modity. I must also admit that I am a book man, that I am 
old-fashioned enough to have read many books, and that I 
hope to read many more. I find them easier reading than 
some other kinds of printed matter. I appear before you, 
therefore, with some diffidence, and shall make my excuses 
in the words of an elder who in my youth was accounted 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS, 


5 


wise. Lord Bacon, a man versed both in affairs and in books, 
says: “ And for the matter of policy and government, that 
learning should rather hurt than enable thereunto, is a thing 
very improbable. We see it is accounted an error to com¬ 
mit a natural body to empiric physicians who commonly 
have a few pleasing receipts whereupon they are confident 
and adventurous, but know neither the causes of diseases 
nor the constitutions of patients, nor peril of accidents, nor 
the true method of cures; we see it is a like error to rely 
upon advocates or lawyers who are only men of practice and 
not grounded in their books, who are many times easily sur¬ 
prised when matter falleth out beyond their experience to 
the prejudice of the causes they handle; so by like reason it 
cannot be but a matter of doubtful consequence if States be 
managed by empiric statesmen not well mingled with men 
grounded in learning. But, contrariwise, it is almost with¬ 
out an instance to the contrary that ever any government 
was disastrous that was in the hands of learned governors.” 
He goes on to say that It hath been ordinary with poli¬ 
tique men to extenuate and disable learned men by the 
name of pedants^ Practical politicians, as they call them¬ 
selves, have the same habit still, only that they have substi¬ 
tuted doctrinaire for pedant as the term of reproach. Now the 
true and mischievous doctrinaire is he who insists that facts 
shall accommodate themselves to preconceived theory, and ^ 
the truly practical man he who would deduce theory from 
the amplest possible comparison and correlation of facts, in 
other words, from recorded experience. I think it is already 
beginning to be apparent on which side of the questions 
which have been brought to the front by the President’s 
Message the doctrinaires are to be found. We all know the 
empiric physicians who are confident and adventurous with 
their few pleasing receipts. 

Your committee asked me to give a title to such suggcs- 


6 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS. 


tions as I might find occasion to make this evening, and I 
took “ The Place of the Independent in Politics ” as the first 
that occurred to me. But I confess that I partake of Mr. 
Walter Shandy’s superstition about names, and shall not 
allow myself to be circumscribed and scanted of elbow-room 
by the appellative I have chosen. I prefer general to per¬ 
sonal politics. I allude to this in order that, in any thing I 
shall say here, I may not be suspected to have one party 
more than another in my mind. I am not blind to the fact 
that Truth always seems to have gone to school to the 
prophet Nathan and to intend a personal application. It is 
perhaps her prime virtue as a stimulant of thought, for 
thought is helpful in proportion as it more and more becomes 
disengaged from self, and this cannot happen till some 
sharp reminder make us conscious of that plausible accom¬ 
plice in our thinking and in the doing which follows from 
it. Though I shall not evade present questions when they 
come naturally in my way, I shall choose rather to indicate 
why there is a necessity that the Independent should have 
a place in politics than to dictate where that place should 
be. I think that something I wrote forty years ago, if you 
will allow me to quote it, will define my notion of what is 
meant by an Independent with sufficient exactness. I then 
said, and I have not changed my mind : 

I honor the man who is ready to sink 
Half his present repute for the freedom to think, 

And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak, 

Will risk t’other half for the freedom to speak. 

Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store, 

Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower. 

Four years ago I was called upon to deliver an address in 
Birmingham, and chose for my theme “ Democracy.” In 
that place I felt it incumbent on me to dwell on the good 
points and favorable aspects of democracy as I had seen 



THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS. 


7 


them practically illustrated in my native land. I chose 
rather that my discourse should suffer through inadequacy 
than run the risk of seeming to forget what Burke calls 
“ that salutary prejudice called our country,” and that obli¬ 
gation which forbids one to discuss family affairs before 
strangers. But here among ourselves it is clearly the duty 
of whoever loves his country to be watchful of whatever 
weaknesses and perils there may be in the practical working 
of a system never before set in motion under such favorable 
auspices or on so large a scale. I have called them weak¬ 
nesses and perils in the system, but it would be idle to dis¬ 
cuss them if I did not believe that they were not so properly 
results of the system, as of abuses in the operation of it, due 
in part to changed conditions, in part to a thoughtless negli¬ 
gence which experience and thought will in due time rectify. 
I believe that no other method of conducting the public 
affairs of men is so capable of sloughing off its peccant parts 
as ours, because in no other are the forces of life at once so 
intense and so universally distributed. 

Before we turn to the consideration of politics as we see 
them in practice, let us think for a moment what, when 
properly understood, they really are. In their least compre¬ 
hensive definition politics are an art which concerns itself 
about the national housekeeping, about the immediate inter¬ 
ests and workaday wants, the income and the outgo of the 
people. They have to deal with practical questions as they 
arise and grow pressing. Even on this humbler plane they 
may well have an attraction for the finest intellects and 
the greatest abilities in a country where public opinion is 
supreme, for they can perform their function only by persuad¬ 
ing, convincing, and thus governing the minds of men. The 
most trivial question acquires dignity when it touches the 
well-being or rouses the passions of many millions. But 
there is a higher and wider sense in which politics may fairly 


8 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS. 


be ranked as a science. When they rise to this level we call 
them statesmanship. The statesman applies himself to the 
observation and recording of certain causes which lead con¬ 
stantly to certain effects, and is thus able to formulate gen¬ 
eral laws for the guidance of his own judgment and for the 
conduct of affairs. He is not so much interested in the 
devices by which men may be influenced, as about how they 
ought to be influenced, not so much about how men’s passions 
and prejudices may be utilized for a momentary advantage 
to himself or his party, as about how they may be hindered 
from doing a permanent harm to the commonwealth. He 
trains himself to discern evils in their causes that he may 
forewarn if he cannot prevent, and that he may not be taken 
unawares by the long bill of damages they are sure to bring 
in, and always at the least convenient moment. He seeks 
and finds in the moral world the weather-signs of the actual 
world. He strives to see and know things as they really are 
and as they are related to each other; as they really are and 
therefore always must be, his vision undeflected by the cross- 
lights of transitory circumstance, his judgment undisturbed 
by the clamor of passionate and changeful opinion. 

That this conception of statesmanship is not fanciful the 
writings and speeches of Burke are ample proof. Many 
great and many acute minds had speculated upon politics 
from Aristotle’s time downwards, but Burke was the first to 
illuminate the subject of his observation and thought with 
the electric light of imagination. He turned its penetrating 
ray upon what seemed the confused and wavering cloud- 
chaos of man’s nature and man’s experience, and found there 
the indication at least, if not the scheme, of a divine order. 
The result is that his works are as full of prophecy, some of 
it already fulfilled, some of it in course of fulfilment, as 
they are of wisdom. And this is because for him human 
nature was always the text and history the comment. 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS. 


9 


There are no more pregnant lessons in the science of how 
to look at things so as to see them and into them, of how 
to distinguish what is per-ennial from what is deciduous in 
apolitical question, than Burke’s two speeches on “Taxa¬ 
tion of the American Colonies ” and on “ Conciliation with 
America.” For if his imagination was fervid, it served but 
to warm his understanding till that grew ductile enough 
to take a perfect impression of fact. If the one made gener¬ 
alization easy, the other, in testing the generalization, com¬ 
pelled him always to make account of the special diagnosis 
of the case in hand. If one would know the difference be¬ 
tween a statesman and a politician, let him compare Burke’s 
view of the American troubles with that of Dr. Johnson,, 
a man of that headstrong common-sense which sees with 
absorbing, one might almost say blinding, clearness what¬ 
ever comes within its immediate field of vision, but is con¬ 
scious of nothing beyond it. The question for Burke was 
not whether Taxation were Tyranny, but whether the 
Americans would think it so. Here was a case in which 
expediency was at one with wisdom. 

But I am happy in being able to find an illustration nearer 
home. Never did three men show more clearly the quality 
of true statesmanship or render a more precious service to 
their country than Senators Fessenden, Trumbull, and 
Grimes, when they dared to act independently of party in 
the impeachment case against President Johnson. They 
saved us from the creeping paralysis which is now gradually 
benumbing the political energies of France. Nay, while we 
were yet in the gristle, we produced statesmen, not, indeed^ 
endowed with Burke’s genius, though fairly comparable with 
him in breadth of view, and sometimes his superiors in practi¬ 
cal sagacity. But I think there is a growing doubt whether 
we are not ceasing to produce them, whether perhaps we 
are not losing the power to produce them. The tricks of 



lO 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS, 


management are more and more superseding the science of 
government. Our methods force the growth of two kinds 
of politicians to the crowding out of all other varieties—him 
who is practical^ and him of the corner grocery. The 

one trades in that counterfeit of public opinion which the 
other manufactures. Both work in the dark, and there is 
need that some one should turn the light of his policeman’s 
lantern on their doings. I believe that there is as much of 
the raw material of statesmanship among us as ever there 
was, but the duties levied by the local rings of majority-manu¬ 
facturers are so high as to prohibit its entrance into com- 
I petition with the protected article. Could we only have 
a travelling exhibition of our Bosses, and say to the Ameri- 
1 can people : “ Behold, the shapers of your national destiny ! ” 
j A single despot would be cheaper, and probably better look- 
( ing. It is a natural impulse to turn away one’s eyes from 
these fleshflies that fatten on the sores of our body-politic 
and plant there the eggs of their disgustful and infectious 
progeny. But it is the lesson of the day that a yielding to 
this repulsion by the intelligent and refined is a mainly efifi- 
cient cause of the evil and must be overcome, at whatever 
cost of selfish ease and aesthetic comfort, ere the evil can be 
hopefully dealt with. 

It is admitted on all hands that matters have been grow¬ 
ing worse for the last twenty years, as it is the nature 
of evil to do. It is publicly asserted that admission to the 
Senate of the United States is a marketable thing. I know 
not whether this be true or not, but is it not an ominous 
sign of the times that this has been asserted and generally 
believed to be possible, if not probable ? It is notorious 
that important elections are decided by votes bought with. 
money, or by the more mischievous equivalent of money, 
places in the public service. What is even more dishearten¬ 
ing, the tone of a large part of the press in regard to this 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS, I r 

State of things is cynical, or even jocular. And how often 
do we not read in our morning paper that such and such a 
local politician is dictating the choice of delegates to a 
Nominating Convention, or manipulating them after they are 
chosen ? So often that we at last take it as a matter of 
course, as something beyond our power to modify or con¬ 
trol, like the weather, at which we may grumble, if we like, 
but cannot help. We should not tolerate a packed jury 
which is to decide on the fate of a single man, yet we are 
content to leave the life of the nation at the mercy of a 
packed Convention. We allow ourselves to be bilked of our 
rights and thwarted in our duties as citizens by men in 
whose hands their very henchmen would be the last to trust 
any thing more valuable than their reputation. Pessimists 
tell us these things are the natural incidents and necessary 
consequences of representative government under Demo¬ 
cratic conditions, that we have drawn the wine and must 
drink it. If I believed this to be so, I should not be speak¬ 
ing here to-night. Parties refuse to see, or, if they see, 
to look into vicious methods which help them to a ma¬ 
jority, and each is thus estopped from sincere protest against 
the same methods when employed by the pther. The people 
of the Northern States thought four years' war not too dear 
a price to prevent half their country being taken from them. 
But the practices of which I have been speaking are slowly 
and surely filching from us the whole of our country—all, at 
least, that made it the best to live in and the easiest to 
die for. If parties will not look after their own drainage 
and ventilation, there must be people who will do it for 
them, who will cry out without ceasing till their fellov/-citi- 
zens are aroused to the danger of infection. This duty can 
be done only by men dissociated from the interests of party. 
The Independents have undertaken it, and with God’s help 
will carry it through. A moral purpose multiplies us by ten 


12 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS. 


as it multiplied the early Abolitionists. They emancipated 
the negro ; and we mean to emancipate the respectable white 
man. 

It is time for lovers of their country to consider how much 
of the success of our experiment in Democracy has been 
due to such favorable conditions as never before concurred 
to make such an attempt plausible; whether those con¬ 
ditions have changed and are still changing for the worse; 
how far we have been accessories in this degeneration, if 
-such there be, and how far it is in our power with the means 
furnished by the very instruments of destruction to stay its 
advance and to repair its ravages. Till within a few years 
of our Civil War, every thing conduced to our measuring 
the success of our institutions by the evidence of our out¬ 
ward prosperity, and to our seeing the future in rose-color. 
The hues of our dawn had scarcely faded from the sky. 
Men were still living who had seen the face and heard the 
voice of the most august personage in our history, and of 
others scarce less august than he. The traditions of our 
founders were fresh. Our growth in wealth and power was 
without precedent. We had been so fortunate that we had 
come to look upon our luck as partly due to our own merits 
and partly to our form of government. When we met to¬ 
gether it was to felicitate each other on our superiority to 
the rest of mankind. Our ears caught from behind the 
horizon the muffled thunders of war, only to be lulled as 
with the murmurs of the surf on a far-off shore. We heard 
of revolutions, but for us Fortune forgot to turn her wheel. 
This was what may be called the Fourth of July period of 
our history. Among the peoples of the earth we were the 
little Jack Horner. We had put in our thumb and pulled 
out a plum, and the rest of mankind thought that we were 
never tired of saying : “ What a good boy am I! ” Here is 
a picture of our growth, drawn by a friendly yet impartial 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS. 13 

hand : Nothing in the history of mankind is like their pro¬ 
gress. For my part, I never cast an eye on their flourishing 
commerce and their cultivated and commodious life but 
they seem to me rather ancient nations grown to perfection 
through a long series of fortunate events and a train of suc¬ 
cessful industry accumulating wealth in many centuries 
than the colonies of yesterday. . . . Your children do not 
grow faster from infancy to manhood than they spread from 
families to communities and from villages to nations.” But 
for a certain splendor of style these words seem to be of 
yesterday, so pertinent are they still. They were uttered in 
the British Parliament more than a year before the battle of 
Lexington, by Edmund Burke. There is no exaggeration in 
them. They are a simple statement of fact. Burke, with 
his usual perspicacity, saw and stated one and a chief cause 
of this unprecedented phenomenon. He tells us that the 
colonies had made this marvellous growth because, “ through 
a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been suf¬ 
fered to take her own way to perfection.” But by that wise 
and salutary neglect ” he meant freedom from the petty and 
short-sighted meddlesomeness of a paternal government; he 
meant being left to follow untrammelled the instincts of our 
genius under the guidance of our energy. The same causes 
have gone on ever since working the same marvels. Those 
marvels have been due in part to our political system. But 
there were other circumstances tending to stimulate personal 
energy and enterprise, especially land to be had for the taking, 
and free trade over a larger share of the earth’s surface peo¬ 
pled by thriving and intelligent communities than had ever 
been enjoyed elsewhere. I think, however, that there was 
one factor more potent than any other, or than all others to¬ 
gether. Before we broke away from the mother country 
politically, a century and a half of that wise neglect ” of 
which Burke spoke had thoroughly made over again and 


14 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS. 


Americanized all the descendants of the earlier settlers, and 
these formed the great bulk of the population. The same 
process was rapidly going on in the more recent immigrants. 
So thorough had this process been that many, perhaps most, 
of the refugees who, during or after the Revolutionary War, 
went to England, or home, as they fondly called it, found 
themselves out of place and unhappy there. The home 
they missed was that humane equality, not of condition or 
station, but of being and opportunity, which by some benign 
influence of the place had overcome them here, like a sum¬ 
mer cloud, without their special wonder. Yet they felt the 
comfort of it as of an air wholesome to breathe. I more 
than suspect that it was the absence of this inestimable 
property of the moral atmosphere that made them aliens in 
every other land, and convinced them that an American can 
no more find another country than a second mother. This 
equality had not then been proclaimed as a right; it had 
been incorporated in no constitution, but was there by the 
necessity of the case—a gift of the sky and of the forest, 
as truly there as it now is in that great West, whose history 
was so admirably treated by Senator Hoar a few days ago, 
and whose singular good-fortune it has been that no dis¬ 
parities except those of nature’s making have ever been 
known there. Except in the cities of the seaboard, where 
the habits of the Old World had to some extent been kept 
alive by intercourse and importation, the defecation of the 
body politic and the body social of all purely artificial and 
arbitrary distinctions had been going on silently and surely 
among the masses of the people for generations. This was 
true (in a more limited sense) even of communities where 
slavery existed, for as that was based on complexion, every 
white, no matter what his condition, belonged to the privi¬ 
leged class, just as in Hungary every Magyar was a noble. 
This was the American novelty, no bantling of theory, no 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS. 


15 


fruit of forethought, no trophy of insurgent violence, but a 
pure evolution from the nature of man in a perfectly free 
medium. The essential triumph was achieved in this tacit 
recognition of a certain privilege and adequacy in mere man¬ 
hood, and Democracy maybe said to have succeeded before 
it was accepted as doctrine or embodied as a political fact. 
Our ancestors sought a new country. What they found was 
a new condition of mind. It is more than questionable 
whether the same conditions in as favorable combination of 
time and place will ever occur again, whether equality, so 
wholesome when a social evolution, as I have described it, 
may not become harmful as a sudden gift in the form of 
dogma, may not indeed prove dangerous when interpreted 
and applied politically by millions of newcorriers alien to our 
traditions, unsteadied by lifelong training and qualifying 
associations. We have great and thus far well-warranted 
faith in the digestive an^ assimilative powers of our system, 
but may not these be overtaxed ? 

The theory of equality was as old, among men of English 
blood, as Jack Cade’s rebellion, but it was not practically 
conceived even by the very men who asserted it. Here 
on the edge of the forest, where civilized man was brought 
face to face again with nature and taught to rely mainly 
on himself, mere manhood became a fact of prime im¬ 
portance. That century and a half of apprenticeship in 
Democracy stimulated self-help, while it also necessitated 
helpfulness for others and mutual dependence upon them. 
Not Avithout reason did “ help ” take the place of servant ” 
in our vocabulary. But the conditions of life led to other 
results that left less salutary effects behind them. They 
bred a habit of contentment with what would do, as we 
say, rather than an impatience of whatever was not best; 
a readiness to put up with many evils or inconveniences, 
because they could not be helped; and this has, especially 


1 6 THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS. 

in our politics, conduced to the growth of the greatest 
weakness in our American character—the acquiescence in 
makeshifts and abuses which can and ought to be helped, 
and which, with honest resolution, might be helped. 

Certainly never were the auguries so favorable as when 
our Republic was founded, a republic sure from inherent 
causes to broaden into a more popular form. But while the 
equality of which I have been speaking existed in the in¬ 
stincts, the habits, and obscurely in the consciousness of all, 
it was latent and inert. It found little occasion for self- 
assertion, none for aggression, and was slow to invent one. 
A century ago there was still a great respect for authority 
in all its manifestations ; for the law first of all, for age, for 
learning, and for experience. The community recognized 
and followed its natural leaders, and it was these who framed 
our Constitution, perhaps the most remarkable monument 
of political wisdom known to history. The convention 
which framed it was composed of the choicest material in 
the community, and was led astray by no theories of what 
might be good, but clave closely to what experience had 
/ demonstrated to be good. The late M. Guizot once asked 
/ me “ how long I thought our Republic would endure.” I 

/ replied : So long as the ideas of the men who founded it 

, continue dominant,” and he assented. I will not say that 

I we could not find among us now the constituents of as able 

: an assembly, but I doubt if there be a single person in this 

[ audience who believes that with our present political meth- 

1 ods we should or could elect them. We have revived the 

I English system of rotten boroughs, under which the electors 

I indeed return the candidate, but it is a handful of men, too 

j often one man, that selects the person to be so returned. If 

; this be so, and I think it is so, it should give us matter for 

very serious reflection. 

After our Constitution got fairly into working order it 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS, 


17 


really seemed as if we had invented a machine that would 
go of itself, and this begot a faith in our luck which even 
the Civil War itself but momentarily disturbed. Circum¬ 
stances continued favorable, and our prosperity went on 
increasing. I admire the splendid complacency of my coun¬ 
trymen, and find something exhilarating and inspiring in it. 
We are a nation which has struck ile^ but we are also a na¬ 
tion that is sure the well will never run dry. And this con¬ 
fidence in our luck, with the absorption in material interests, 
generated by unparalleled opportunity, has in some respects 
made us neglectful of our political duties. I have long 
thought that the average men of our Revolutionary period 
were better grounded in the elementary principles of gov¬ 
ernment than their descendants. The town-meeting was 
then a better training-school than the caucus and the con¬ 
vention are now, and the smaller the community the greater 
the influence of the better mind in it. In looking about me, 
I am struck with the fact that while we produce great cap¬ 
tains, financial and industrial leaders in abundance, and 
political managers in over-abundance, there seems to be a 
pause in the production of leaders in statesmanship. I am 
still more struck with the fact that my newspaper often 
gives me fuller reports of the speeches of Prince Bismarck 
and of Mr. Gladstone than of any thing said in Congress. 
If M. Thiers or M. Gambetta were still here it would be the 
same with them ; but France, like ourselves, has gone into 
the manufacture of small politicians. Why are we inter¬ 
ested in what these men say ? Because they are important 
for what they are as well as for what they represent. They 
are Somebodies, and their every word gathers force from 
the character and life behind it. They stand for an idea 
as well as for a constituency. An adequate amount of 
small change will give us the equivalent of the largest 
piece of money, but what aggregate of little men will 


i8 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS. 


amount to a single great one, that most precious coinage 
of the mint of nature ? It is not that we have lost the 
power of bringing forth great men. They are not the 
product of institutions, though these may help or hinder 
them. I am thankful to have been the contemporary of 
one and among the greatest, of whom I think it is safe to 
say that no other country and no other form of government 
could have fashioned him, and whom posterity will recog¬ 
nize as the wisest and most bravely human of modern times. 
It is a benediction to have lived in the same age and in the 
same country with Abraham Lincoln. 

Had Democracy borne only this consummate flower and 
then perished like the century-plant, it would have discharged 
its noblest function. It is the crown of a nation, one might 
almost say the chief duty of a nation, to produce great men, 
for without them its history is but the annals of ants and 
bees. Two conditions are essential—the man and the oppor¬ 
tunity. We must wait on Mother Nature for the one, but 
in America we ourselves can do much to make or mar the 
other. We cannot always afford to set our house on fire as 
we did for Lincoln, but we are certainly responsible if the 
door to distinction be made so narrow and so low as to admit 
only p,etty and crouching men. 

A Democracy makes certain duties incumbent on every 
citizen which under other forms of government are limited 
to a man or to a class of men. A prudent despot looks 
after his kingdom as a prudent private man would look after 
his estate; in an aristocratic republic a delegated body of 
nobles manages public affairs as a board of railroad directors 
would manage the property committed to their charge ; in 
both cases, self-interest is strong enough to call forth every 
latent energy of character and intellect; in both cases the in¬ 
dividual is so consciously important a factor as to insure a 
sense of personal responsibility. In the ancient democracies 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS. 


19 


a citizen could see and feel the effect of his own vote. But 
in a democracy so vast as ours, though the responsibility be 
as great (I remember an election in which the governor of 
a State was chosen by a majority of orre vote), yet the infin¬ 
itesimal division of power wellnigh nullifies the sense of it, 
and of the responsibility implied in it. It is certainly a great 
privilege to have a direct share in the government of one’s 
country, but it is a privilege which is of advantage to the 
commonwealth only in proportion as it is intelligently exer¬ 
cised. Then, indeed, its constant exercise should train the^ 
faculties of forethought and judgment better, and should 
give men a keener sense of their own value than perhaps 
any thing else can do. But under every form of representa- 
tative government, parties become necessary for the mar¬ 
shalling and expression of opiniqp, and, when parties are 
once formed, those questions the discussion of which would 
discipline and fortify men’s minds tend more and more to 
pass out of sight, and the topics that interest their prejudices 
and passions to become more absorbing. What will be of 
immediate advantage to the party is the first thing con¬ 
sidered, what of permanent advantage to their country the 
last. I refer especially to neither of the great parties which 
divide the country. I am treating a question of natural 
history. Both parties have been equally guilty, both have 
evaded, as successfully as they could, the living questions of 
the day. As the parties have become more evenly balanced, 
the difficulty of arriving at their opinions has been greater 
in proportion to the difficulty of devising any profession of 
faith -meaningless enough not to alarm, if it could not be so 
interpreted as to conciliate, the varied and sometimes con¬ 
flicting interests of the different sections of the country. If 
you asked them, as Captain Standard in Farquahar’s comedy 
asks Parley, “ Have you any principles ? ” the answer, like 
his, would have been “ Five hundred.” Between the two a 


20 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS. 


conscientious voter feels as the traveller of fifty years ago 
felt between the touters of the two rival hotels in the village 
where the stage-coach stopped for dinner. Each side deaf¬ 
ened him with depreciation of the other establishment till his 
only conclusion was that each was worse than the other, and 
that it mattered little at which of them he paid dearly for an 
indigestion. When I say that I make no distinctions be¬ 
tween the two parties, I must be allowed to make one ex¬ 
ception. I mean the attempt by a portion of the Republi¬ 
cans to utilize passions, which every true lover of his country 
should do his best to allay, by provoking into virulence 
again the happily quiescent animosities of our Civil War. 
In saying this I do not forget that the Democratic Party was 
quite as efficient in bringing that war upon us as the seceding 
States themselves. Nor do I forget that it was by the same 
sacrifice of general and permanent interests to the demands 
of immediate partisan advantage which is the besetting 
temptation of all parties. Let bygones be bygones. Yet, I 
may say in passing that there was something profoundly 
comic in the spectacle of a great party, with an heroic past 
behind it, stating that its policy would be to prevent some 
unknown villains from doing something very wicked more 
than twenty years ago. 

Parties being necessary things, it follows of course that 
there must be politicians to manage and leaders to represent 
and symbolize them. The desire of man to see his wishes, 
his prejudices, his aspirations, summed up and personified in 
a single representative, has the permanence of an'instinct. 
Few escape it, few are conscious of its controlling influence. 
The danger always is that loyalty to the man shall insensibly 
replace loyalty to the thing he is supposed to represent, till 
at last the question what he represents fades wholly out 
of mind. The love of victory as a good in itself is also a 
powerful ingredient in the temperament of most men. Forty 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS. 


21 


odd years ago it would have been hard to find a man, no 
matter how wicked he may have believed the Mexican War 
to be, who could suppress a feeling of elation when the news 
of Buena Vista arrived. Never mind the principle involved, 
it was our side that won. 

If the dangers and temptations of parties be such as I 
have indicated, and I do not think that I have overstated 
them, it is for the interest of the best men in both parties 
that there should be a neutral body, not large enough to 
form a party by itself, nay, which would lose its power for 
good if it attempted to form such a party, and yet large 
enough to moderate between both, and to make both more 
cautious in their choice of candidates and in their connivance 
with evil practices. If the politicians must look after the 
parties, there should be somebody to look after the poli¬ 
ticians, somebody to ask disagreeable questions and to utter 
uncomfortable truths; somebody to make sure, if possible, 
before election, not only what, but whom the candidate, if 
elected, is going to represent. What to me is the saddest 
feature of our present methods is the pitfalls which they dig 
in the path of ambitious and able men who feel that they 
are fitted for a political career, that by character and train¬ 
ing they could be of service to their country, yet who find 
every avenue closed to them unless at the sacrifice of the 
very independence which gives them a claim to what they 
seek. As in semi-barbarous times the sincerity of a con¬ 
verted Jew was tested by forcing him to swallow pork, so 
these are required to gulp without a wry face what is as 
nauseous to them. I would do all in my power to render 
such loathsome compliances unnecessary. The pity of it is 
that with our political methods the hand is of necessity sub¬ 
dued to what it works in. It has been proved, I think, that 
the old parties are not to be reformed from within. It is 
from without that the attempt must be made, and it is the 


22 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS. 


Independents who must make it. If the attempt should 
fail, the failure of the experiment of democracy would inev¬ 
itably follow. 

But I do not believe that it will fail. The signs are all favor¬ 
able. Already there are journals in every part of the country 
—journals, too, among the first in ability, circulation, and 
influence—which refuse to wear the colors of party. Al¬ 
ready the people have a chance of hearing the truth, and I 
think that they always gladly hear it. Our first aim should 
be, as it has been, the reform of our civil service, for that is 
the fruitful mother of all our ills. It is the most aristocratic 
system in the world, for it depends on personal favor and is 
the reward of personal service, and the power of the politi¬ 
cal boss is built up and maintained, like that of the mediaeval 
robber baron, by his freehandedness in distributing the prop¬ 
erty of other people. From it is derived the notion that 
the public treasure is a fund to a share of which every one 
is entitled who by fraud or favor can get it, and from this 
again the absurd doctrine of rotation in office so that each 
may secure his proportion, and that the business of the na¬ 
tion may be carried on by a succession of apprentices who 
are dismissed just as they are getting an inkling of their 
trade to make room for others who are in due time to be 
turned loose on the world, passed masters in nothing but 
incompetence for any useful career. From this, too, has 
sprung the theory of the geographical allotment of patron¬ 
age, as if ability were dependent, like wheat, upon the soil, 
and the more mischievous one that members of Congress 
must be residents of the district that elects them, a custom 
which has sometimes excluded men of proved ability, in the 
full vigor of their faculties and the ripeness of their experi¬ 
ence, from the councils of the nation. All reforms seem 
slow and wearisome to their advocates, for these are com¬ 
monly of that ardent and imaginative temper which inaccu- 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS, 


23 


rately foreshortens the distance and overlooks the difficulties 
between means and end. If we have not got all that we 
hoped from the present administration, we have perhaps got 
more than we had reason to expect, considering how widely 
spread are the roots of this evil, and what an inconvenient 
habit they have of sending up suckers in the most unexpect¬ 
ed places. To cut off these does not extirpate them. It is 
the parent tree that must go. It is much that we have 
compelled a discussion of the question from one end of the 
country to the other, for it cannot bear discussion, and I for 
one have so much faith in the good sense of the American 
people as to feel sure that discussion means victory. That 
the Independents are so heartily denounced by those who 
support and are supported by the system that has been 
gradually perfected during the last fifty years, is an excel¬ 
lent symptom. We must not be impatient. Some of us 
can remember when those who are now the canonized saints 
of the party which restored the Union and abolished slavery 
were a forlorn hope of Mugwumps, the scorn of all practical 
politicians. Sydney Smith was fond of saying that the se¬ 
cret of happiness in life was to take short views, and in this 
he was but repeating the rule of the Greek and Roman poets, 
to live in every hour as if we were never to have another. 
But fie who would be happy as a reformer must take long 
views, and into distances sometimes that baffle the most 
piercing vision. 

Two great questions have been opened anew by the Pres¬ 
ident : reduction of revenue and the best means of effecting 
it, and these really resolve themselves into one, that of the 
War Tariff. I say of the War Tariff because it is a 
mere electioneering device to call it a question of pro¬ 
tection or free trade pure and simple. I shall barely allude 
to them as briefly as possible, for they will be amply discussed 
before the people by more competent men than I. I can- 


24 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS. 


not help thinking that both are illustrations of the truth 
that it is a duty of statesmen to study tendencies and proba¬ 
ble consequences much rather than figures, which can as 
easily be induced to fight impartially on both sides as the 
condottieri of four centuries ago. All that reasonable men 
contend for now is the reduction of the tariff in such a way 
as shall be least hurtful to existing interests, most helpful to 
the consumer, and above all as shall practically test the 
question whether we are better off when we get our raw 
material at the lowest possible prices. I think the advocates 
of protection have been unwise and are beginning to see that 
they were unwise in shifting the ground of debate. They 
have set many people to asking whether robbing Peter to 
pay Paul be a method equally economical for both parties, 
and whether the bad policy of it be not all the more flagrant 
in proportion as the Peters are many and the Pauls few ? 
Whether the Pauls of every variety be not inevitably forced 
into an alliance offensive and defensive against the Peters 
and sometimes with very questionable people? Whether if 
we are taxed for the payment of a bounty to the owner of 
a silver mine, we should not be equally taxed to make a pres¬ 
ent to the owner of wheat fields, cotton fields, tobacco fields, 
hay fields, which are the most productive gold mines of the 
country? Whether the case of protection be not like that of 
armored ships, requiring ever thicker plating as the artillery of 
competition is perfected ? But the tendency of excessive pro¬ 
tection which thoughtful men dread most, is that it stimu¬ 
lates an unhealthy home competition leading to over-pro¬ 
duction and to the disasters which are its tainted offspring ; 
that it fosters over-population, and this of the most helpless 
class when thrown out of employment; that it engenders 
smuggling, false invoices, and other demoralizing practices; 
that the principle which is its root is the root also of Rings, 
and Syndicates, and Trusts, and all other such conspiracies 
for the artificial raising of profits in the interest of classes 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS. 


25 


and minorities. I confess I cannot take a cheerful view of 
the future of that New England I love so well when her 
leading industries shall be gradually drawn to the South, 
as they infallibly will be, by the greater cheapness of labor 
there. It is not pleasant to hear that called the American 
System which has succeeded in abolishing our commercial 
marine. It is even less pleasant to hear it advocated as being 
for the interest of the laborer by men who imported cheaper 
labor till it was forbidden by law. The true American sys¬ 
tem is that which produces the best ifien by letting them 
as much as possible to their own resources. That pro¬ 
tection has been the cause of our material prosperity is re¬ 
futed by the passage I have already quoted from Burke. 
Though written when our farmers’ wives and daughters did 
most of our spinning and weaving, one would take it for a 
choice flower of protection eloquence. We have prospered 
in spite of artificial obstacles that would have baffled a peo¬ 
ple less energetic and less pliant to opportunity. The so- 
called American System, the system, that is, of selfish ex¬ 
clusion and monopoly, is no invention of ours, but has been 
borrowed of the mediaeval guilds. It has had nothing to do 
with the raising of wages, for these are always higher in 
localities where the demand for labor is greater than the 
supply. And if the measure of wages be their purchasing' 
power, what does the workman gain, unless it be the pleasure 
of spending more money, under a system, which, if it pay 
more money in the hire of hands, enhances the prices of 
what that money will buy in more than equal proportion ? 

Of the surplus in the Treasury I will only say that it has 
already shown itself to be an invitation to every possible 
variety of wasteful expenditure and therefore of demoralizing 
jobbery, and that it has again revived those theories of grand¬ 
motherly government which led to our revolt from the mother 
country, are most hostile to the genius of our institutions and 
soonest sap the energy and corrode the morals of a people. 


26 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS. 


It is through its politics, through its capacity for govern¬ 
ment, the noblest of all sciences, that a nation proves its 
right to a place among the other beneficent forces of nature. 
For politics permeate more widely than any other force and 
reach every one of us, soon or late, to teach or to debauch. 
We are confronted with new problems and new conditions. 
We and the population which is to solve them are very un¬ 
like that of fifty years ago. As I was walking not long ago 
in the Boston Public Garden, I saw two Irishmen looking at 
Ball’s equestrian statue of Washington, and wondering who 
was the personage thus commemorated. I had been brought 
up among the still living traditions of Lexington, Concord, 
Bunker’s Hill, and the siege of Boston. To these men Ire¬ 
land was still their country, and America a place to get their 
daily bread. This put me upon thinking. What, then, is 
patriotism, and what its true value to a man ? Was it merely 
an unreasoning and almost cat-like attachment to certain 
square miles of the earth’s surface, made up in almost equal 
parts of lifelong association, hereditary tradition, and paro¬ 
chial prejudice? This is the narrowest and most provincial 
form, as it is also, perhaps, the strongest, of that passion or 
virtue, whichever we choose to call it. But did it not fulfil 
the essential condition of giving men an ideal outside them¬ 
selves, which would awaken in them capacities for devotion 
and heroism that are deaf even to the penetrating cry of 
self? All the moral good of which patriotism is the fruitful 
mother my two Irishmen had in abundant measure, and it 
had wrought in them marvels of fidelity and self-sacrifice 
which made me blush for the easier terms on which my own 
duties of the like kind were habitually fulfilled. Were they 
not daily pinching themselves that they might pay their 
tribute to the old hearthstone or the old cause three thou¬ 
sand miles away? If tears tingle our eyes when we read 
of the like loyalty in the clansmen of the attainted and ex¬ 
iled Lochiel, shall this leave us unmoved ? 


THE INDEPENDENT IN POLITICS. 


27 


I laid the lesson to heart. I would, in my own way, be as 
faithful as they to what I believed to be the best interests of 
my country. Our politicians are so busy studying the local 
eddies of prejudice or interest that they allow the main chan¬ 
nel of our national energies to be obstructed by dams for 
the grinding of private grist. Our leaders no longer lead, 
but are as skilful as Indians in following the faintest trail of 
public opinion. I find it generally admitted that our moral 
standard in politics has been lowered, and is every day going 
lower. Some attribute this to our want of a leisure-class. It 
is to a book of the Apocrypha that we are indebted for the 
invention of the Man of Leisure.* But a leisure-class without 
a definite object in life, and without generous aims, is a bane 
rather than a blessing. It would end in the weariness 
and cynical pessimism in which its great exemplar Ec¬ 
clesiastes ended, without leaving us the gift which his 
genius left. What we want is an active class who will in¬ 
sist in season and out of season that we shall have a country 
whose greatness is measured not only by its square miles, its 
number of yards woven, of hogs packed, of bushels of wheat 
raised, not only by its skill to feed and clothe the body, but 
also by its power to feed and clothe the soul; a country 
which shall be as great morally as it is materially ; a country 
whose very name shall not only, as now it does, stir us as 
with the sound of a trumpet, but shall call out all that is best 
within us by offering us the radiant image of something bet¬ 
ter and nobler, and more enduring than we, of something 
that shall fulfil our own thwarted aspiration, when we are 
but a handful of forgotten dust in the soil trodden by a 
race whom we shall have helped to make more worthy of 
their inheritance than we ourselves had the power, I might 
almost say, the means to be. 


* “ The wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure, and he 
that hath little business shall become wise.”— Ecclesiasticus xxxviii., 24. 









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Questions of the Day> No. XL VIII. 


THE 

Independent in Politics 


JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 


NEW YORK & LONDON 

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS 


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1888 









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